Womanly Sounds
Women's Music and Lesbian Transfeminisms and Transphobias in the 1970s
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3265387 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Julia Golda Harris (American University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 51 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 13-34 |
| Publication date | 2025-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0097-9740 • E-ISSN: 1545-6943 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/736001 |
| OpenAlex | W4414759254 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 11 |
Why did the most significant conflicts over trans inclusion and exclusion in US lesbian feminist spaces in the late twentieth century take place within women’s music settings? Such incidents include the 1990s conflict between Camp Trans and the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival; the campaign to oust Sandy Stone, the trans sound engineer at Olivia Records in the late 1970s; and attacks on the trans lesbian musician Beth Elliott onstage at the 1973 West Coast Lesbian Conference, which she had helped to organize. In this article, I examine writings by organizers of the West Coast Lesbian Conference and songs by Elliott and the butch lesbian musician Maxine Feldman, who transitioned to male in middle age, to answer the above question. I argue that the particular bodily nature of music-making and -listening became a venue through which women’s music participants, both cis and trans, made claims to womanhood and thus became a space within which those claims also drew contestation. I also tease out the proto-transfeminist critiques embedded in musical works by Elliott and Feldman, who each leveraged women’s music as a potent tool for claiming lesbian selfhood in the face of transphobic oppression
Face (sociological concept) · Feminism · Inclusion (mineral) · Lesbian · Musical · Violin musical styles · Music History and Culture · Musicology and Musical Analysis · Theater, Performance, and Music History
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |